Strange Quarks

When the recurrent nova U Sco goes into outburst again, the image below shows where it will appear (see cross-hair style position marker), with the bright star Antares, and those bracketing it, shown for reference:

Zooming in shows two stars to the right of the nova position marker. Looking at previous outbursts, U Sco’s peak brightness should be somewhere between these two (around magnitude 7.5 to 8, so a binocular or small telescope object).

I’m taking images from my backyard of the U Sco region when I can. The image below (click it to enlarge) was taken on Sep 10 2021. I’ve taken a few since but want to step up the regularity. The red arrow shows where U Sco will appear and the green arrow shows the two stars pointed to above.

In any case, I won’t have the same cause to complain about missing the next outburst of U Sco that Leslie Peltier did about missing the T CrB outburst in 1946 (as related near the end of a recent talk I gave about RS Oph), given that my observing frequency is likely to be less and over a much shorter timeframe.

Addendum: Having said all this, given that there was almost certainly an unobserved eruption in the 2017 seasonal gap, as announced in a March 2019 AAVSO forum post, what does this imply for the prediction made by Brad Schaefer of 2020+/-0.7 in a paper published in June 2019? And yet, see the next post…

This entry was posted on September 27, 2021 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Variable Stars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.